| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Facino Cane by Honore de Balzac: the sight of the clarionet player, till the thoughts now grown cold in
his face burned hot within my soul.
The fiddle and the flageolet took a deep interest in bottles and
glasses; at the end of a country-dance, they hung their instruments
from a button on their reddish-colored coats, and stretched out their
hands to a little table set in the window recess to hold their liquor
supply. Each time they did so they held out a full glass to the
Italian, who could not reach it for himself because he sat in front of
the table, and each time the Italian thanked them with a friendly nod.
All their movements were made with the precision which always amazes
you so much at the Blind Asylum. You could almost think that they can
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from A Treatise on Parents and Children by George Bernard Shaw: law and order with free institutions is not a natural one. It is a
matter of inculcation. If people are brought up to be slaves, it is
useless and dangerous to let them loose at the age of twenty-one and
say "Now you are free." No one with the tamed soul and broken spirit
of a slave can be free. It is like saying to a laborer brought up on
a family income of thirteen shillings a week, "Here is one hundred
thousand pounds: now you are wealthy." Nothing can make such a man
really wealthy. Freedom and wealth are difficult and responsible
conditions to which men must be accustomed and socially trained from
birth. A nation that is free at twenty-one is not free at all; just
as a man first enriched at fifty remains poor all his life, even if he
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Turn of the Screw by Henry James: and it enabled me, on crossing the threshold, not only to recognize,
on a chair near the wide window, then closed, the articles I wanted,
but to become aware of a person on the other side of the window
and looking straight in. One step into the room had sufficed;
my vision was instantaneous; it was all there. The person looking
straight in was the person who had already appeared to me.
He appeared thus again with I won't say greater distinctness,
for that was impossible, but with a nearness that represented
a forward stride in our intercourse and made me, as I met him,
catch my breath and turn cold. He was the same--he was the same,
and seen, this time, as he had been seen before, from the waist up,
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